Gendernomics: On risk, goals and time

Grand old man of strategy Michael Porter says in the article “What is strategy” that a strategy is just as much about what not to do as it is about what to do. This may seem self-evident, but as a species we are often the species that do not want to say no to anything. This is frequently true of men who are pre-red pill, who find themselves in a situation where rather than selecting a mate, they get a mate selected for them. The concept of a false choice centers on choices between options where there are really no real options, the funniest example is Eddie Izzard’s sketch “Cake or Death” [1] If you perceive yourself as having a singular option for a partner, then in reality you have no choice.

The term actually comes from the military, ancient Greek where it translates into “art of the general“. To put it in more concrete terms, strategy is how you win a war, tactics is how you win a battle. A parallel would be how researchers break down a research hypothesis into operational hypotheses. Strategy is not a plan of action, it is what forms the foundation on which, you build your plan of action.

This results in 3 primary elements of strategy; a goal, time and risk. Thus, in order to build a strategy, you must know that which you want to force into fruition. The time constraints for achieving that end, and finally, the probabilities relating to that which must be done.

On goals

An objective or multiple objectives are important to a life, in that a man without objectives, becomes an object in a vacuum, never acting until acted upon by an external force. Frequently, this will result in the man in question ending up in situations, not as a choice, but as a coincidence. There is no plan behind his actions, and no real actions behind his actions. It is like rafting down a river without a paddle, it may be exiting at times, but you are sure to hit some rocks on the way.

By having goals, you enable yourself to follow Dr. Porter’s advice, because if you are not cognizant of what you want to do, you will also not know what you do not want to do. When you are certain what you want, you can always ask yourself the question “What purpose would doing this serve?” You will also be able to determine if you are engaging in the actions required in order to reach your goal, within the time limit you have set for yourself.

There are many types of goals, there are long term goals, short-term goals, goals that you never see yourself being able to complete but serve as motivation or guidance. To each his own goals, but have them. However, the downside of goals is that once they are achieved one often becomes disillusioned. This could happen for many reasons, for instance you expected the goal to drastically alter you life, and it did not. The goal itself became your reason for existence, rather than a means to that existence.

I speak of means and ends in another post and this has become one of my first principles. If a goal is an end in itself, then achieving it is your ultimate goal, and therefore in your mind it will always be defined as a definitive end with no after-effects. If a goal is an end, then you are engaging in the goal for the sake of the goal itself, not because of effects it will have on your life. If a goal is a means to an end on the other hand, for instance learning game in order to attract more women, then it follows that you are not engaging in the goal for the goal in itself, but for the benefits derived from achieving it. For a goal of this type, one must plan further ahead, what is your next goal after this goal?

The element of time, value and an uncertain future

People tend to have a fatal flaw when predicting the future forward from the past. If oil has been a safe haven for your capital or typewriters have been the writing implement of choice for 5 decades, there is no conceivable reason for why this would not also be the case in the future. This is why the movie “Blade Runner“, while imagining many interesting aspects of 2019, also assumed that phone booths would exist at that time, and how many of you have seen one in the last 5 years?

As explained in my gendernomics posts on the SMP and supply & demand I explain that most men live most of their lives from the time they start becoming interested in women, to the time they are usually married off, in a position where they feel lucky if a woman will give them the time of day. This is a function of the supply and demand characteristics of the sexual market place. Women grow up in a position where they are in constant demand, and spend their first 10 – 20 years in the sexual market place, at both a higher value than their male peers. Thus, it is easy to see why they would assume this lasts forever.

As you can see from the graph, men grow up in a situation where they are not equal value to females for most of their life, and as a result they are prone to settling before their time, due to a perception of scarcity in the markets created by hypergamy [2] and female psychology [3]. Scarcity mindsets leads to mistakes. In our past as cavemen, we could die from scarcity much more frequently, leading to mechanisms of frenetic attempts to avoid becoming victims.

This can be likened to negotiation from a weak position [4] where the male due to the perceived scarcity and marketing tricks used by women, rushes to settle prior to hitting his own sexual market value peak. This can be likened to a merger between two companies, where one company has been a dominant player for a long time, but they have become slow, sluggish and the market no longer goes for their product. The other company is a nimble and fast start-up, that may be struggling a bit with cash, but is obtaining great growth. The start-up may think that a deal to merge with the large company is a great deal, but they are on their way up, and the large company is on the way down, meaning that perhaps in 2 – 5 years the start-up will have eclipsed the giant.

However, men being fed a diet of scarcity for most of their life, elect to settle too soon, instead of holding out for the better deal out of fear of losing the deal that is on the table. They elect to act on the flawed future projection that the value of the female and their own value, will remain relatively the same going forward, as they have in the past. It is the ultimate example of “better with 1 bird in the hand, than 5 on the roof”. The men project their scarcity mindset and the experienced sexual market dynamics going forward in a linear fashion, and women do as well. Thus, women assume that their value can only increase with time, men that their value will remain static relative to that of the female.

The trouble is that while many men view taking an early offer on the table as the low risk option, it is in fact a high risk option.

The element of risk

The reason why I refer to the marrying before peak as the highest risk option, is that a man will most likely be marrying a woman on a downward value trajectory while he is rising. This is similar to stock traders that attempt to buy a stock just as it reaches it’s bottom, something which is often referred to as the equivalent of attempting to catch a failing knife. Refer to the graph earlier in the post, and you can see that the crossover happens between 28 and 31, which is around the same age as the median age for a first marriage. [5] As a woman is on the way down in value, the odds of the deal being poor for her if she marries a man equal to, or older than her is very small.

The odds of the man getting a poor deal is much larger as a result of both her declining SMV and his increasing/soon to increase SMV. If he pairs off, his resources will rapidly be directed away from investments that increase his SMV, and into joint ventures of sorts, where both the man and the woman enjoy the benefits. From the perspective of the woman, this is doubly-beneficial, because she can utilize his resources to her own ends, in addition to limiting his options to replace her.

The SMV peak is a relative number, in essence it is the highest value you can achieve based on potential x (effort x time). For a man to realize his highest value, it in essence becomes a case of wealth, health, and many other factors. Women, and family takes time, which is the only true zero-sum currency. We can print money or diplomas, we cannot print more time. A man who marries at 32, has a first child at 33, will not spend as much time cultivating his career, maintaining his health, and educating himself, thus reducing his chances of reaching SMV potential. If you add child support for 1 – 3 children that man is a de facto workhorse for the next 18 years of his life.

Statistically speaking, 40 – 50% of all first marriages end in divorce, with the divorce rate for subsequent marriages even higher. Women initiate 70% of divorces. [6] Therefore, 50% of the men who marry at 31, will end up divorced, some of them past the SMV peak, some before, but if there are children or significant assets involved, they may never experience their peak. So, in this sense, they have committed a double-drop in their value, they have lost their time investment, and based on a 50-50 split after a divorce, they may have lost half of their earnings from that time period. The math being (Male assets earned during period*Rate of return) + (time allocated to relationship * realistic estimate of alternate allocation value)

Conclusions & Summary

This post started with a statement of how strategy is as much about deciding what to not to do, as it is about deciding what to do. This was demonstrated through the argument of poor valuation of SMV going forwards and the high risk of making decisions based on your current value, rather than a realistic future value. It is one of the paradoxes of modern life, that every woman seem to think that she is a princess who deserves to be treated like royalty, while many men seem to think of themselves as her workhorse. An interesting parallel to “Animal Farm” by George Orwell is that men are the horse, but see themselves as the pigs, where women are the pigs, but see themselves as the horse.

So, what strategy should you select? Dr. Porter outlines 3 possible positions. Differentiation, Cost leadership and stuck in the middle, with a moderating influence ranging from mass market to niche named “focus”. It is clear to me that being the “cheap” option for the mass market translates into Beta game. The Beta game is centered around offering the woman a low-risk (for her) deal, where the man pledges to allocate his resources towards her, where she may remain in control and where he lives for her self-actualization.

Sigma game would be differentiated with a niche focus, while alpha game is differentiation with a mass market appeal. “Purple pill” strategy, translates into a “stuck in the middle” strategy.

A note:

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Potentially we could develop that technology, we could also develop mind-uploading, cybernetic bodies and a host of other tech that would let us live forever, but at present we cannot print more time. So, I’m correct in saying that at present we cannot print more time, however in the future we may be able to, however we cannot take it for granted. In the next 100 – 500 years, we could get functional immortality, we could colonize our solar system and possibly others. We could build a Dyson sphere around the sun, and we could strip-mine space. This does not change the current conclusion.

It is hard to say how the SMP would change. It was hard to predict what would happen to the economy when they got rid of the gold standard, when it moved from largely local to increasingly global or when fossil fuels facilitated increased specialization and production.
For men, it would mean that they could remain at their physical prime for longer, thus retaining that value, while increasingly gaining in terms of status, social proof, wealth and so on. For men, it would probably remain much the same, as the top 1 – 5% women prefer would remain constant, the bar would just go higher.

For women, it is very tied to how the age increase would affect their fertility. Would the male preference for younger women be impacted by a non-aging female population? Secondly, if we assume that female value is derived from beauty and fertility, it would limit their value gain beyond those 2 variables whereas males could increase and increase their value in eternity.